


Dialogic: Season 4

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Dialogic [5]
Category: Castle
Genre: Estrangement, F/M, Family, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Jealousy, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 08:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 17,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19663843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: After watching around to the end of the series (i.e., "Hollander's Woods," because nothing after that exists), and taking some time to watch a few other things during workouts, I'm back around to the beginning of the series again.This story is 23 brief sketches, one for each episode of Season 4, inspired by a line of dialogue from the episode.I did the same thing for Seasons 1,  2, and 3 but there's no reason you couldn't read this story (or any chapter of any of these stories) independent of the others.





	1. Temporal—Rise (4 x 01)

> _How long is awhile?”  
>  —Kevin Ryan, Rise (4 x 01)_

* * *

  
****She comes back early. She exits her convalescence before she is supposed to, because she can’t stand the unrelieved cacophony of her own thoughts—her own pain—one minute longer. She returns to her life before anyone is expecting her, only to find that they they’ve moved on. The world has moved on.

She’s come unstuck in time. It’s an absurd, melodramatic, _stolen_ way to think about things, but it’s the closest she’s come to capturing what this feels like. Life or some facsimile thereof. It’s the declaration she keeps coming back to, everywhere she goes—everywhere she’s called on to re-enter, keep up, exist: She’s come unstuck in time.

In her apartment, every flat surface is covered with vessels for dead and dying things. Vases stand in rows along the window sill. They line the counter, the cooktop, the desk, the dining table. They’re wedged together in cardboard boxes here and there on the floor. There’s clear glass and chunky, glazed ceramics in a panoply of colors, shapes, sizes. There are misguidedly cheerful tin watering cans and squat, ugly wicker baskets. Each one is empty, save for the cards tucked inside, their surfaces covered with the handwriting of strangers taking dictation down a phone line— _get well, thinking of you, get well._ She can’t fathom who would have—could have—done it and how it was accomplished. She can’t imagine what they were thinking.

At the precinct, Captain Montgomery’s office is occupied by someone else. It is brimming now with this hostile stranger’s things, and the mechanics of that are utterly jarring. The disconnect. It must have been empty for a time. Someone—multiple someones—must have emptied it. Uniforms or suits from 1 PP. Evelyn and the girls or nameless people someone hired to wrap and box the framed photos and the ugly bronze statue of liberty that eternally sat behind his desk.

In the bullpen, the investigation is over, full stop. Everything there was to pursue has been pursued. Every line of inquiry has been exhausted, and every question she could ask—does ask—has an answer. But how can she believe that? The evidence, such as it was, has been packed away, again by unknown hands under unknown circumstances. The murder board is gleaming and blank, but it must have been filled once, a motley of Esposito’s impatient chicken scratch and Ryan’s careful schoolboy letters in particolored ink. All of that is gone now. The board has been filled and emptied and filled and emptied who knows how many times without her. 

In the world, Castle is angry with her. He has moved on, away, beyond the mix of desolation and relief and hope and longing that, for her, is frozen in that bedside moment. He spits out the absolute chronology and it sounds like nonsense in her ears. _Three months,_ he says, but for her, there is only _since the shooting,_ and there seems to be no way of overlaying the two. She has come unstuck in time, and he is shockingly, forcefully, angry with her—irrevocably so—and it’s this fact that slingshots her into the present, even if it’s for the briefest of moments. 

Whatever mark this leaves or doesn’t leave, whatever scar they will or will not have to endure hereafter on everything that has been and will be, he will always have waited for three months. He will always have been with Esposito and Ryan every day, working the case until he wa _s not_ there every day, through no fault or choice of his own. And weaving in and out of those—running along simply, concurrently—he was lonely, he was hopeful, he was worried and wistful and uncertain. He was not angry, and then he was. And so he remains, here, now, forever if she doesn’t do something about it, but she’s come unstuck in time. How can she do anything? How can she?

She doesn’t know, but she can’t do nothing, either. The present is baffling to her. It is utterly inaccessible, so she reaches back. She casts about for some anchoring moment that might fix her in place.

_After my mother was killed, something inside me changed._


	2. Aegis—Heroes and Villains (4 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s thinking about sending Captain Gates flowers. Not to suck up, not at all. It took him less than a week to realize that trying to get into the good graces of someone as devoid of anything resembling a personality as their new fearless leader is a cause as lost as trying to coax a linear narrative from his mother’s mouth.

> _I was just being supportive.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Heroes and Villains (4 x 02)_

* * *

He’s thinking about sending Captain Gates flowers. Not to suck up, not at all. It took him less than a week to realize that trying to get into the good graces of someone as devoid of anything resembling a personality as their new fearless leader is a cause as lost as trying to coax a linear narrative from his mother’s mouth.

But he’s still thinking about flowers or chocolate or maybe a heat rock. Something a cold-blooded creature would like, because it’s only polite to send some kind of thank you to the good Captain for the gift she keeps on giving, even though she most certainly doesn’t mean to: She brings out Beckett’s protective side in all its multifaceted glory.

It manifests as a leap of faith with Ann Hastings. He doesn’t know what passed between her and the young woman in the interrogation room, any more than she knows about the quiet, hopeful solidarity he and Paul Whittaker found in one another. He only knows that she emerges from the one-on-one she insisted on with the firm, quiet conviction that whatever lines Hastings might have blurred in the creation of her alter ego, she’s innocent of the murder of Tyler Faris.

_I just — I know._

It lights a fire in him, the way she strides to the board with complete clarity of purpose. She doesn’t bat an eye when he suggests that yet another Lone Vengeance imposter, Occam’s Razor be damned, is the only solution that makes sense. He wants to cheer when she stands tall and tells Gates that, yes, they are taking Ann’s claim about the knuckle plate seriously, and yes, they will be bringing Tony Valtini back in, because Ann is innocent.

He falls ever more in love with her when he watches from a distance as she speaks a word or two of wisdom low in the young woman’s ear. He can’t say what that’s about either, but he doesn’t know that she’d have been inclined to say anything at all if it weren’t for the fact that she knows that among other things, there’s likely to be a Victoria Gates lurking somewhere in Hastings’ near future.

When it comes to him, she’s a little more guarded in showing that fierce, protective side. She’s a bit graceless about it. They both are as they explore the new ground it breaks. It chafes him that she’s fan-girling all over his _Avengers #1_ in the same breath that she suggests that he should dial himself back. He doesn’t love the idea that she, closet nerd that she is, suddenly finds him and his issues, comic book and otherwise, embarrassing.

But then the penny drops. He takes a breath and lets down his own guard. He hears the tentative care in her voice, even when the words are not so gentle. He opens his eyes and sees that it’s not about him or her or them at all. It’s about Gates. Her shields are up when it comes to him, because they’ve only just found their way back to each other, and she wants to keep him by her side. Because Gates is _everywhere_ and into _everything_ that has anything to do with her team, and she doesn’t want to risk him being banished all over again. She wants him by her side, and she’ll do what she has to to keep him there. 

He has the Captain to thank for this formidable, protective version of the warrior he’s long known Beckett to be. The least he can do is send some flowers.


	3. Happenstance—Head Case (4 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have their moments in the strangest places. The fact that they’re having moments at all—unequivocal, definite moments—is strange in itself. But the places they have them are stranger still.

> _“In an odd way, he got lucky.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Head Case (4 x 03)_

* * *

They have their moments in the strangest places. The fact that they’re having moments at all—unequivocal, definite _moments_ —is strange in itself. But the places they have them are stranger still.

They’re strolling through Softcore Porn HQ when he casually lets drop the assumption that they be in each other’s lives ten years from now. That they’ll be _together_ by the end of then. For her part, she looks down at her own body—at where her scars dwell—and quips that she doesn’t need implants. He laughs, but she means it. The way he looks at her, she feels like she is more than good enough, as is, and they manage a bona fide moment before they have to turn their attention to the porn mogul himself.

In the morgue, they get embroiled in something beyond even their usual put-together spark. He feeds her a line, then she feeds him. Lanie is somewhere in the background. There’s a headless body somewhere in the background, along with the rest of the world, but the two of them are having a moment. Lanie tells them it’s cute, _after_ she catches their attention with cacophony of an autopsy saw, and it is cute. It’s freaking adorable, and she should probably hate herself a little bit. She should probably at least blush about the fact that they have their moments in spaces and places that are unconventional, to say the least.

But she doesn’t blush. She doesn’t flinch or look away when they have Cynthia Hamilton in custody and the heartbroken woman makes the choice to wait out the stretch until the next lifetime alongside her husband. She kneels over the body, her eyes fixed on the photo clutched to the woman’s chest. She feels the weight of his gaze, and when she turns to meet it, they’re having yet another moment. This one is complicated. It’s not cute or breezily ebullient. It’s somber and searching and filled with questions about what they live for, what they’d die for—what choices they will make, alone and together. It’s tragedy and poetry and a long road they both know they have yet to travel, but it’s a moment.

She doesn’t blush, she doesn’t flinch, but all the same, she’s glad for this moment, maybe the strangest of all. They’ve accompanied Cynthia Hamliton’s body to Passageway. It’s a strange, practical thing. She died in custody. There’ll be an inquest, and that’s technically why the two of them are there in the eerie blue light of the storage facility. But it’s more than that as they stand quietly by, bearing witness. She has the sense of stars overhead as they stand shoulder to shoulder in the cavernous space. She has the sense of the wide world stretching out around them and nested within it, the intimate space defined by their mingled breath and their words twining around one another. She has the sense of infinite potential and she tells him so: _Anything is possible._


	4. Confutation—Kick the Ballistics (4 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their impromptu salute to Ryan—their celebration of Jane—is a quiet, short-lived affair. They down their respective fingers of scotch from water cooler cups. They stand a moment longer, staring at the floor in silence, until the group dissolves.

> _“Today was a win.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Kick the Ballistics (4 x 04) _

* * *

Their impromptu salute to Ryan—their celebration of Jane—is a quiet, short-lived affair. They down their respective fingers of scotch from water cooler cups. They stand a moment longer, staring at the floor in silence, until the group dissolves.

He thinks about suggesting another drink, a proper one at the Old Haunt, but however much he’d like a bit of company, he can tell that asking would be more than a little tone deaf. Solitude and stoicism, that’s how the three of them will cope with everything that lingers, so he’ll figure out his own version of that. He’ll give his mother some skeletal narrative with far more satisfying falling action. He’ll try to give her closure. He’ll write some for himself, if it comes to that. 

In any case, he keeps his mouth shut when Ryan pointedly crushes his cup in one hand and says with an unconvincing smile that he’s calling it a day. He nods and doesn’t make eye contact when Espo follows suit. He says his own goodbyes far more quietly, far more hastily, than usual. He heads for the stairs.

He’s focused on his own feet. The appearance of his shoe against the stained concrete that’s been painted over again and again and again. He holds tight to the railing, a defense against the fact that he’s too focused on the descent of his own body. The rhythm of it comes apart. He’s not dizzy exactly, but each footfall is a calculated risk. He’s not sure that any one of them will come down where he means it to. He’s not sure he won’t go down hard with the next step or the next.

“Castle!”

Her voice—his name—rings out from above. It bounces off each of the walls, the flight of stairs above him, the distant ceiling. It jerks his head upward and he does fall, then. He stumbles, at least, missing one step and skidding down the edge of the next two before he comes to a clumsy stop with one palm against the battleship grey wall, just as she arrives on the landing, swift and graceful.

“Are you okay?” She reaches out to steady him, but he waves her off.

“Yeah. Just missed a step.” He rights himself and flashes a smile. “Did you … need something?”

She gives him a little bit of an _Are You Kidding Me?_ look, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. They stand there, both apparently at a loss.

“You kind of ran out,” she says finally. “Do _you_ … are you okay?”

“Of course.” He tries his hand at the stoic thing. He knows he’s not pulling it off, but he can’t find the right beat here. “Yeah. Fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay.” She’s a bit crestfallen. More than a bit, but she rallies. She works her way past her own tendencies—past his strange imitation of them. She plants her feet and turns her body fully toward him. “Castle, that was really good work making the connection between Phillip Lee and Tyson.”

“Hey, I can read with the best of them.”

He’s going for light-hearted, but that’s off, too. It’s a version of himself that doesn’t quite land for either of them. It draws an apologetic half-gesture from him, an exasperated look from her, awkward silence from them both.

“Beckett—”

“Castle—“

The rush into the breach simultaneously.

“Look. I mean it. So shut up, ok?” She glares. He smiles. It’s something closer to normal, and he cedes the floor to her with a sweep of his hand. She nods and goes on. “This case. It was really hard on Ryan.” Her hand twitches a fraction of an inch toward the gun on her hip, and it might say something not particularly flattering about him that he gets it—he gets the cop thing—in a way he hasn’t until that moment. “But I know it’s been hard on you, too.”

“Yeah. It has been. It is,” he says. It’s a simple fact. “It’s not the same, though.” That’s a simple fact, too. 

“It’s not,” she nods. “But you’re both blaming yourself more than you should.” She flicks another glare at him. His jaw snaps shut. She’s caught him out, of course, and they share a sliver of a smile between them. “And you both did good work. You got justice for Jane.”

“We did,” he says, as much to make himself believe it as anything. “We all did.”


	5. Affect—Eye of the Beholder (4 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If therapy is about getting in touch with her emotions, then she’s making progress: She wants to punch Burke in his maddeningly placid What Are You Really Afraid Of? face. Anger. Frustration. Those are emotions, and she’s truly, madly, deeply in touch with them right now.

> _“Am I supposed to trip her up? Get her to break?”  
>  —Richard Castle, Eye of the Beholder (4 x 05) _

* * *

If therapy is about getting in touch with her emotions, then she’s making progress: She wants to punch Burke in his maddeningly placid _What Are You Really Afraid Of?_ face. Anger. Frustration. Those are emotions, and she’s truly, madly, deeply in touch with them right now.

She hates herself. That’s an emotion, too. It’s such a bonanza of emotions that she can hardly count them all. She hates herself for the stupid journey she’s taken back in time to her awkward fourteen-year-old self. She hates her cattiness about Serena _Catch Me Any Time_ Kaye. She hates her own insecurity, her stubborn blind spot when it comes to this woman. And she really hates the fact that it’s interfering with ability to do her job. She hates that she is wasting time and energy wondering if she gets to count all the different things she hates separately. If she gets credit for each instance and a gold star to hang on the fridge.

She hates him. Castle. She hates him for trotting off with his tongue lolling after Serena and her seedy underbelly contacts who aren’t yesterday’s news. She hates that suddenly _I’m Not A Cop_ is plus in his mind, when last week it was a crisis. She hates him for the journey he’s taken back in time, to Richard Castle, chest signer extraordinaire, and she hates him even more for . . . not taking that particular journey?

She hates the awkward dance they’re doing in this neither-here-nor-there present. She hates that he probably wouldn’t have offered up the fact that he’s been sharing cutesy morning texts with Serena, and he’s emphatic, in a bewildered way, about letting her know he hasn’t been sharing anything else with her nemesis. She hates him for not knowing what to do with the fact that he loves her when she can’t love him back yet.

He loves her.

She doesn’t know if certainty is an emotion. Clarity. Conviction. She doesn’t know if any or all those count, but they rain down on her in the instant after he asks. _So you think I should … pursue it?_ They patter gently on her shoulders and bubble up in her chest. They settle her and rile her up. They wash through her in tides, roaring and gentle at once, and she doesn’t know if they count.

They hurt. Along with everything else, they _hurt,_ and that makes her think maybe they do count. But they don’t hurt, too. They … the opposite of hurt, and the fact that she doesn’t know the word for that makes her think she doesn’t get that gold star after all.

She trails back to Burke when it’s all over. When Serena Kaye is gone and Castle isn’t. Certainty, Clarity, Conviction aren’t, and neither are her old friends, Anger, Frustration, Hate, though those three might be a little worse for wear.

“He said he loves me,” she says as she sinks into the wide leather chair. She kind of hates that thing, too. She kind of hates the half-moon marks in the arms that she knows her fingernails fit into exactly.

“Again?” Burke sounds surprised. He sounds like what she thinks he’d sound like if he were human and surprised.

“No, not again,” she snaps. “Then. He said it then.”

He says nothing. He sets the yellow pad with its fresh blank page on the arm of his own chair. He clicks his pen closed and sets it on top. He folds his hands and waits.

“I think he meant it.” She feels a tear course down her cheek. Another and another and another. She feels their throat thicken and her head and heart pound off kilter with one another. “I didn’t … I didn’t think so before. But now I think maybe he did.”

“You think,” he says, leaning into the verb almost imperceptibly.

“I feel,” she sneers. She hates herself. She hates this chair and this room and this man and his stupid, maddeningly placid _What Are You Really Afraid Of?_ face. “I believe, okay? I believe that he loves me.”

“Good,” Burke says after a pause that feels like it’s a hundred years long at least. “Belief. That’s progress, Kate.”

“Progress,” she laughs. It’s a wet, ugly sound. She grabs a fistful of tissues from the box that’s always on hand. “Do I get a gold star?”

“Two at least.” He cracks the first smile she’s seen from him. “One for feeling and one for believing.”


	6. Ministry—Demons (4 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s tiptoeing around her a little bit. Their interview with Addison Smith was productive after a fashion, but something’s a bit off with her. She seems tense—unhappy with something, and it’s not just the possibility that their current best suspect is also the long-term best suspect in another murder, and he’s evaded capture for the last twenty years.

_“I was just blowing off some steam”  
—Barry Bavetta, Demons (4 x 06)_

* * *

He’s tiptoeing around her a little bit. Their interview with Addison Smith was productive after a fashion, but something’s a bit off with her. She seems tense—unhappy with something, and it’s not just the possibility that their current best suspect is also the long-term best suspect in another murder, and he’s evaded capture for the last twenty years.

Smith takes his leave. She lets him go without so much as the courtesy of walking the retired detective to the elevator. She sits at the break room table, with her palms laid flat on either side of the worst of the crime scene photos of Melanie Benton. She’s staring through it, stack of photos, table, and all, and he’s kind of at a loss. He’s not sure whether he should slink away to minimum safe distance or try to figure out what’s going on with her.

He decides on Plan B. It’s probably him that has her wound up. It’s probably his overzealous pro-ghost agenda, so he braces himself to make an apology. He sidles up close to the table. He slides back into the chair he’d vacated when Smith had made his move to leave. That’s when he sees it: A raised area running along the side of her right hand from the delicate prominence of her wrist all the way to the base of her thumb. It’s a nauseatingly not-quite clear, fluid-filled pillow with angry red skin just visible around the perimeter.

“Beckett!” He reaches for her hand. “That blister. That’s a burn. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly. She jerks her hand away, but the motion causes the sleeve of her jacket to drag roughly over the area. She hisses in pain. “It’s nothing.” 

“It doesn’t look like nothing.” He draws his hand away, but bends forward to peer at it. It’s worse than just the blister. The thumb itself is tight and pinker than it should be almost all the way to the tip. “Did you try making a latte again?” It comes out far more like an accusation than he means it to.

“You said you’d make me one!” she retorts.

They stare at each other, both embarrassed, both snappish, and the solve—to this at least—clicks. He’s tired and slow from an all-nighter. She’s under-caffeinated, because he accidentally drank both the coffees he’d raced out to get somewhere just after dawn. Their whole system has broken down. The thought nudges a dopey grin on to his face. They have a system.

“What?” she asks sullenly. Warily. _“What?”_

“Nothing,” he says. He holds his hand out, palm up. “Let me see the damage. We’ll take care of that, and then I’ll make you a double.”

“It’s fine.” She curls her fingers tight, a reflex to hide, but she winces again as the move pulls at the scalded skin and the contact burn itself.

“Beckett.” He rolls his eyes. “Do you _want_ a sca—”

He swallows the _r,_ but only just. Their eyes meet and he wonders if his are as blank with panic as hers. There’s so much missing time for him. Life skips from her bleeding out on the grass to dying in the ambulance to having died on the operating table. It skips from her, shattered and barely upright in a hospital bed, to _Kate—you can make it out to Kate._

Sitting with her, here and now, he registers for the first time how carefully she’d put herself together to show up at that book signing. Here and now, he sees her in a jacket that skims the lines of her body, with her hair pulled softly back from the sharp bones of her face, and he knows she must be struggling still with the terrible physical ordeal. She’s struggling. 

“Well,” she says as her hand sneaks out toward his where it still waits, palm up. “I am collecting the whole set.”

“I don’t blame you.” He matches her tongue-in-cheek tone and wills his finger not to shake as they gently draw hers closer to survey the damage. “Scars are badass.” He sneaks a sly smile at her. “Guys dig scars


	7. Incubus—Cops and Robbers (4 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s pretty sure this is all an anxiety dream. It starts with a cryptic demand—tell me you need me—and here she is now in a sweaty hot trailer with a Captain who shouts impossible things at her. He demands impossible things, as though he’s running down the list of her personal failings.

> _“It’s not my imagination.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Cops and Robbers (4 x 07)_

* * *

She’s pretty sure this is all an anxiety dream. It starts with a cryptic demand— _tell me you need me_ —and here she is now in a sweaty hot trailer with a Captain who shouts impossible things at her. He demands impossible things, as though he’s running down the list of her personal failings.

_Do the opposite of whatever your homicide training tells you._

_Keep him talking._

_Sometimes no move is the best move._

_Be who you aren’t or everyone dies. Castle dies._

Peterson might as well come out and say that last one, but that’s not how it works in anxiety dreams. Still. She’s pretty sure this is one, and she petulantly wants the phone to wake her as it does so often. She thinks back to it ringing from somewhere deep in her piles of paperwork— _tell me you need me._ In the good part of the dream, she told him there were no dead bodies as though that were a disappointment. It _is_ a disappointment. She’d kill for a dead body right now. 

And then there is one. Agnes Fields is dead, and she wants to arch an eyebrow and remind Peterson that he said he’d call if someone died. She wants to tell him he’s the one who missed his cue. It’s stupid. She is stupid and sluggish and bad at the paltry few things she is supposed to be doing. She is worse than bad when suddenly Alexis is there.

She has the urge to scan the crowd for the first boy who broke her heart and the third grade teacher who hated her. She fully expects them to be leading the charge of a cavalcade of others to stop by to weigh in on her failures. But it’s just her and Alexis, and all she can do is spout brittle platitudes that happen to be pitiful truths: _We’re doing everything we can._ It’s exactly like an anxiety dream except she’s not naked.

And then she _is_ naked. It’s her own plan. It’s hardly even a plan at all, but it’s something she can do. She can throw her body in front of Peterson’s blunt force solutions, so she is naked in the Command Center’s lav, a space that feels like it’s hardly wider than her shoulders. She is shivering and too hot and sweating and all goosebumps. She is trying to make sense of uniform trousers and shirt buttons.

She is trying to put on the costume of someone who can do something about any of this, and when she emerges—when she looks down once, twice, three times to make sure this isn’t one of those dreams where she gets on the subway and realizes she’s wearing a skirt and nothing on top—there are people waiting to fuss. The paramedics want to adjust the stethoscope and adjust the holster for various scissors on her belt. They want to take her gun.

They take her gun, and she is naked all over again. She is a stiff-limbed scarecrow that lets itself be manhandled and patted down, because his eyes are locked on her. She is unequal to the task she’s set for herself. She can gather intel on no one but him. Castle and Martha just beyond. She looks to him, fixes her gaze on him.

_Tell me you need me._

She goes to him, and suddenly there is life in her. Suddenly, she is a ferocious denizen of the waking world with her fingers wrapped around his: _Just keep breathing. I promise I am going to get you out of here._


	8. Gamble—Heartbreak Hotel (4 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hitching himself to Ryan and Esposito’s out-of-town jaunt isn’t entirely impulse, though he spins it that way to himself, to the boys, to her with a sly, over-the-shoulder grin as he dashes for the elevator. It seems sensible, given that Gates has not warmed to him one bitty bit, and Beckett could probably use a break from the scrutiny. Their metallic overlord loves to lurk, and without Ryan and Esposito as a buffer … well, there’s some calculation to his joining the road trip.

> _“Where you’re always a winner.”  
> _ _—Kate Beckett, Heartbreak Hotel (4 x 08)_

* * *

Hitching himself to Ryan and Esposito’s out-of-town jaunt isn’t entirely impulse, though he spins it that way to himself, to the boys, to her with a sly, over-the-shoulder grin as he dashes for the elevator. It seems sensible, given that Gates has not warmed to him one bitty bit, and Beckett could probably use a break from the scrutiny. Their metallic overlord loves to lurk, and without Ryan and Esposito as a buffer … well, there’s some calculation to his joining the road trip.

He does love Atlantic City, though. He remembers loving Atlantic City. But truth be told, it’s all on the shabby side this time. They arrive at the Casino, and he smiles as he takes it all in. He waits for memory and the taste for chaos to rise up in him, but really, it’s all a bit shabby, from Charlie Turner in a pinstripe, charcoal suit that somehow manages to be loud, to the piped-in fantasy of someone hitting it big on the slots.

There’s some fun in trying to get the IBPWOC plan on track. He knows who to call, although there are moments when he can feel his bones creaking, because damn it’s been a long time and with some of them, he’s drilling down to five, six, seven assistants ago. But he knows what to say. He knows how much flattery is too much and how not to snare himself in promises he has no interest in keeping. There’s some fun in flexing those particular muscles, and it might be that there’s some calculation in it, too.

He’s uneasy sometimes with how dramatically his life has changed in the last few years. The long summer took its toll on that score, and even now when he’s hopeful—he’s achingly _hopeful_ —he can’t help but be a little … alarmed by the fact that he isn’t even on the fringes of most of the circles and scenes where he’d once been in the thick of things. He’s caught off guard that it’s been five, six, seven assistants and he’s not exactly on anyone’s speed dial anymore in this corner of the world, and he had some good times her. He really did, though they seem impossibly distant now. Impossibly of the past, and he’s uneasy sometimes with his … lack of fallback plan?

Not that he wants one. That’s an unexpectedly instructive part of the out-of-down jaunt. He laughs about jam on the drapes and a mattress on fire, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t like having times like that to look back on. But looking back and falling back are two different things. That’s never more clear than when she arrives on the scene.

He strides out of the Casino, resplendent in a jumpsuit truly worthy of The King, and calls out boldly that his plan worked. He knows who the killer is. It’s a tremendously satisfying proclamation, all the more so because she’s smiling and scowling and rolling her eyes and laser-focused on him all at the same time.

It’s fitting and right and Atlantic City doesn’t look nearly so shabby when they’re tag-teaming Tommy Moretti. It’s fitting and right and he loves this place a different way when he walks her out to her car.

“You’re sure?” He’s asked half a dozen times already, seriously and not.

“Castle, do you have any idea how many killers I brought in before you started following me around?” She rounds on him, hands on hips, car keys dangling from one finger. She’s serious and not, too.

“Nope,” he says. “But however many it was, it wasn’t nearly as much fun.”

“ _Speaking_ of fun.” She says, pointedly moving on. She doesn’t deny it. She smiles and he smiles and she doesn’t deny it. “You’ll keep Esposito from having too much of it?”

“Esposito?” He feigns ignorance. “It’s Ryan’s bachelor party.”

“Yeah.” She tosses the keys in her hand. “And I’m guessing that by appletini #2 or 10:30—“

“Whichever comes first,” he puts in.

“Whichever comes first,” she allows, “Ryan will be ugly crying on the phone with Jenny about how much he loves her.”

“Fair,” he says. “I’ll keep an eye on Esposito.” He regards her uncertainly. “Are you sure you don’t want us to wait until you …”

“Bachelor party, Castle. Strictly a boy thing.” She shakes her head. They’re both grinning down at the gross, stained concrete of the parking garage. “But it won’t be nearly as much fun without me.”

“It won’t,” he assures her. He makes plans in the back of his head. He’s hopeful, and he makes plans to fall in love with Atlantic City all over again in the not too distant future. “It won’t be nearly as much fun.”


	9. Presage—Kill Shot (4 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a breakthrough, it’s a bit anticlimactic. She’s hunkered in the evidence room with the rifle in her hands. A host of different emotions pulses through her—pain so chaotic and comprehensive that it has color and scent and sound. Fear, confusion, outrage, sorrow. Determination. That’s where she lands. It’s anticlimactic, but she’s determined not to just live with this. She’s determined to be better than she has been, but as usual, that will have to wait. Catching the sniper—ending this—comes first. It has to come first.

> _“Where have you been?”  
>  —Richard Castle, Kill Shot (4 x 09)_

* * *

****For a breakthrough, it’s a bit anticlimactic. She’s hunkered in the evidence room with the rifle in her hands. A host of different emotions pulses through her—pain so chaotic and comprehensive that it has color and scent and sound. Fear, confusion, outrage, sorrow. Determination. That’s where she lands. It’s anticlimactic, but she’s _determined_ not to just live with this. She’s determined to be better than she has been, but as usual, that will have to wait. Catching the sniper—ending this—comes first. It has to come first.

That’s all well and good: Determination is a lot better than everything up till now: repression, resignation, avoidance. It’s better than shrinking back from anything real, but she doesn’t know quite how to use it. She doesn’t know quite where this breakthrough, such as it is, can take her when it comes to the case, and that’s what she needs to focus on.

She moves to put the rifle down, to put it away and shift gears, but her fingers won’t uncurl. Her arms won’t release their fifteen-pound burden, and she falters with the tears still coursing down her cheeks. She wonders if this is any kind of breakthrough at all. She feels heavy in every cell of her body and something insidious slithers in. It whispers that this is nothing but a failure. It’s an admission of defeat _—He’s damaged goods—So am I._

It passes through her mind, though. Javi’s words and then her own pass through her mind and out of her body, and with them goes the insidious whisper. She shifts her hold on the rifle. She feels the weight in a different way. It’s not a symbol. It’s not _just_ a symbol. _It’s a tool._ Javi’s words again. _Use it. Make it a strength._ It’s literal, suddenly. It’s practical and useful. It comes together with other words. His, Castle’s, from a time that feels like the beginning, literally and not literally, but that’s a revelation for later. 

_You want to get into a killer’s head, go to where the killer was and see what problems he had to face._

And so she does. She makes her way to the sniper’s second hide with the rifle in tow. She walks the crime scene with the weight of it in her arms. She takes a breath and lifts the scope to her eye. She sees what he would have seen, thinks what he would have thought. She tries to climb, and she can’t right now. Not in the shape she’s in. It’s literal and it’s not—physical pain that she lets herself feel, maybe for the first time, and with it, a critical piece of information comes to light. She knows their killer in a way no one else can. 

She goes to meet them armed with that. She goes to meet her boys, her partner, her team and her family and more. She finds Lee Travis and stares down the barrel of what she might have been without them all. She runs painfully up against her own limits. _No_. The limits of what she can do—what can be done—with and for someone whose pain has long since consumed him.

Javi saves her life, literally and not literally. Burke’s words pass through her mind— _You’re not the only cop in the city_ —and that’s … annoying. It’s a pain in the ass that she needs to wrap her mind around such basic fucking things.

But that’s the breakthrough, really. She topples into the wide leather chair in Burke’s office. She draws her knees up, holding herself together, literally and not literally. She is in pieces, and she sees now that this is how it works. How it will work and it can work: With her in pieces, not compartments.

For the time being, that’s how it will work. It’s a bit anticlimactic, but it’s a breakthrough.


	10. Legato—Cuffed (4 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s not a fan of the fact that she has superlatives when it comes to brushes with death: Strangest, worst, most recent. He would prefer her brushes with death to be hypothetical, imaginative, strictly on the page. That said, this one—her strangest, and his too—definitely had its charms.

> _“Hundred and first time’s the charm.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Cuffed (4 x 10)_

* * *

He’s not a fan of the fact that she has superlatives when it comes to brushes with death: _Strangest, worst, most recent._ He would prefer her brushes with death to be hypothetical, imaginative, strictly on the page. That said, this one—her strangest, and his too—definitely had its charms.

He got to wake up with her, and that’s not nothing. He got to open his eyes to her arm around his neck and her breath warming his skin. He got to hold her hand and snug his body right up to positively unmentionable parts of her body, and honestly, it was pretty difficult at times to keep his mind on the high probability of their demise and the myriad, terrible forms that might take.

He got to fight with her. Not _fight_ fight, but he got to push her buttons, and she got to push his in a not-everyday way. They get as caught up in the Castle and Beckett show as anyone sometimes. He tweaks her, she annihilates him, and it’s fun. It’s cute. It’s who they are in performance, but this was different. They bickered. They aired real grievances about the everyday things that bug them, and they got to do it all without untimely interruptions by the children.

Well, without the usual onslaught of untimely interruptions. Ryan and Esposito, of course, did manage to pop into existence at exactly the moment he’d have loved to have fifteen seconds more of. Provided those fifteen seconds were not _actually_ filled with tooth and claw and carnage, just the looming threat of it, because it seems like that’s what it takes with them.

He was on the verge of telling her again. _Kate—I love you, Kate._ The words were on his lips, because in a world of uncertainty, he knows with unshakable conviction that he wants that to be the last thing he says as he leaves it. Of course, he’d prefer that were forty, fifty, a hundred years from now. He’d also prefer it to be the _first_ thing he says when staff in futuristic silver jumpsuits pull them both out of cryogenic storage in a dramatic cloud of sublimated whatever, but that is definitely his envoi.

And he kind of thinks she knows that, because she had rolled right over him in that critical moment. She had called herself a survivor, and the other reason he’d have liked fifteen more seconds of canoodling with death is he definitely would have liked to hear more about that. He would have liked to ask what her plans are for life beyond tiger kibble and a bullet to the heart. He’d have liked fifteen more seconds to ask what’s going on between them, because he thinks she knows what he’d been about to say.

He’s pretty convinced, in fact. He’s just not sure how she knows, or what “knowing” really means in this context. She could know because it’s obvious. It’s embarrassingly obvious every time he hands her coffee in the morning and every time he quietly says _Until tomorrow_ at night. It’s obvious when he looks at her, talks to her, thinks about her, inhales her scent at the murder board, brushes against her as he helps her with her coat, hears her voice and on and on and on. It’s _obvious_ and that might be how she knows. 

More and more, though, he thinks that she might remember, too. He’s not quite sure what that means, either. It could be there are bits and pieces coming back to her. It could be that the whole awful thing is shut away somewhere because she needs it to be right now. It could be anything in between, and he wishes they’d talked about that. He wishes maybe they’d spent a little less time bickering—or maybe even a little less time in various full-contact positions—and just talked. 

But they didn’t, and that’s mostly okay. Because she might remember, she probably knows, and she definitely thinks about herself as a survivor now. It’s mostly okay, because it won’t always take brush with death for them to move forward together. Next time, they’ll do it without the tiger.


	11. Tell Me—Till Death Do Us Part (4 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She keeps expecting to feel … something as she gets ready for the wedding. Melancholy or avoidant or simply bad, that’s what she keeps expecting to feel. Not because of Kevin and Jenny, not at all. She’s a little weepy about them, because Kevin is the baby of the group, and the two of them are nauseating, but they’re adorable, too, and she feels all the usual things.

> _“Speaking of sweet …”  
> _ _Richard Castle, Till Death Do Us Part (4 x 11)_

* * *

She keeps expecting to feel … something as she gets ready for the wedding. Melancholy or avoidant or simply bad, that’s what she keeps expecting to feel. Not because of Kevin and Jenny, not at all. She’s a little weepy about them, because Kevin is the baby of the group, and the two of them _are_ nauseating, but they’re adorable, too, and she feels all the usual things.

She feels hopeful for them, of course, and she’s excited to see The Dress and laugh over whatever Jenny’s saddled the bridesmaids with. She has a handkerchief tucked into her tiny purse, because she _will_ cry at the vows, and she _will_ deny it, and all of that’s good.

But she’s braced for the turbulent black beneath the good things, because that’s what life is for her. It’s what it has been for a long, long time, though it’s amplified since the shooting for sure—the anxiety about the crowd, pre-emptive exhaustion at the prospect of putting on a happy face for hours and hours.

And shame about her body.

That one’s new. It’s the stupidest thing and one she’s only recently unearthed in the confines of Burke’s office. She’s ashamed, and it’s not just the fact of having been shot. She’s dealt with that—mostly dealt with the fact that she was shot by a sociopath for hire as part of a vast conspiracy that began when she was still in braces, and it’s not some kind of professional failing.

And still, she’s ashamed by the frailty of her own form. She’s ashamed that she has scars, inside and out, that are still healing all these months on. She’s ashamed that the simplest things hurt sometimes—a lot—and to some extent, nothing but time will change that. It’s the stupidest thing, and she keeps waiting for it to hit hard today—special occasion shame—but honestly it never comes.

There are the usual things about the dress that are annoying—hose and the right kind of underwear. The right kind of bra and fighting with the damned zipper and her scars until she’s sweating. She has to reheat the curling iron to touch up a little bit of the damp hair sticking to her neck. She has to go after her nose and forehead and hairline with the powder, because whoever invented the zippers in women’s clothing is a complete sadist, but honestly, that’s the worst of it, a no-more-than-usually annoying run-in with the limits of her body.

And there’s more. It’s better than that being the worst of it, because she does feel things, but they’re good. She feels excitement as she slips into her shoes, a brand new pair of oh-my-god platform heels in a nude patent leather that’s perfect with the subtle pewter luster of the dress. She rises some breathtaking number of inches above the floor and everything she wasn’t sure about—the dress’s prim neckline, hair down, not up, special occasion make-up for a Sunday afternoon wedding—all comes together.

She’s the opposite of ashamed, never more so when she catches first sight of him and they make a date. His eyes sweep up and down her form, and she is definitely not ashamed, though she blushes as they make their way, arm in arm, up the aisle and he breathes _You look amazing_ in her ear.

She blushes when he holds a hand out at the reception to wordlessly claim a dance.

“Okay.” She lets him tug her from the chair, and her scar twinges. She smiles through it. “But no dipping, Castle.”

“That’s what Esposito’s for,” he says as he slides a palm over the curve of her hip.

It’s an old fashioned song. It’s not exactly a slow dance, but it’s the kind of thing that lets them sway cheek to cheek. It lets them say the things they’re not saying out loud just yet, and she smiles against his shoulder.

“Have I told you that you look amazing?” He ducks his head to ask. It’s mostly an excuse to let his lips brush her cheek and raise a shiver on her skin. It’s mostly an excuse.

“You have,” she replies. She sneaks a peek up at him. Her lips jgraze the line of his jaw, and that’s an excuse, too. “But you can tell me again.”

“You do.” He draws his arm tighter around her. He draws her body into his. “You look beautiful.”


	12. Eddy—Dial M for Mayor (4 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s always been a combination of a restless soul and a homebody. There was a time when he’d have denied the latter part, or at least attributed it to Alexis—to the fact that someone in her life had to be stable, and Lord knows that lot fell definitely to him.

> _“Even good men make mistakes.”  
> _ _—Kate Beckett, Dial M for Mayor (4 x 12)_

* * *

He’s always been a combination of a restless soul and a homebody. There was a time when he’d have denied the latter part, or at least attributed it to Alexis—to the fact that someone in her life had to be stable, and Lord knows that lot fell definitely to him.

The truth is, though, he likes the quiet. He likes the well-ordered space, and though he’d die on the rack before admitting it, he even likes the not-so-well-ordered elements that his mother brings to the confines of the loft. He likes to wander—to travel, writ large, but to roam the city itself, too—and he finds it all the sweeter for the fact that he has home to come to.

But the peace of his little kingdom is disrupted tonight. His mother’s literal strum und drang has subsided for the moment, and his daughter isn’t actively manufacturing crises. Still, he’s ill at ease in the kitchen, in the living room, in the office. Most especially in the office.

He pulls up the storyboard—the _murder_ board for her mother, for Montgomery now, too, as well as the other victims. He works on another scotch and thinks with no small amount of self-flagellation that he ought to add Bob Weldon’s political ambitions to the list of victims. He swirls the liquor in the glass and thinks his thoughts and nerves ought to be grateful for the chaotic company.

He hates this. He doesn’t trust the mysterious Mr. Smith as far as he can throw him, and given how close he hasn’t gotten to the shadowy figure, that’s a distance he can’t even estimate. He hates keeping this secret—this huge, _volatile_ secret—from her, and he hates even more that he doesn’t know if the decision—the ongoing decision he has to keep making—is sensible or selfish. He hates that the two possibilities have crossed in the ether. He’s resigned to the fact that it was almost certainly selfish at exactly the moment he was most convinced it was sensible. And now that he’s stared that particularly truth down, it’s suddenly, demonstrably sensible if the architect of all this is willing to take out the Mayor to get to her.

He blacks out the screen with a fierce jab of his finger and hurls the remote aside to land wherever it may. He sets the rocks glass down hard enough on the desk that he suspects one or both won’t make it through the night. He casts about for the coat he knows he threw down somewhere after he made his second jaunt to the parking garage. Peace is eluding him here, so he guesses he’ll have to go looking for it. His phone rings before he can. Her image appears, startling for all the wrong reasons tonight.

He answers it. He’s trying too hard right out of the gate. “Ah, Beckett. You’ve decided to dial a goddess?”

 _“Castle.”_ She says his name and falters. She ignores the joke or maybe doesn’t hear it at all. _“You’re still up.”_

“Yeah.” He sinks into a chair, restless even before he comes to rest. “Still up.” He pauses. He leaves a space for her to jump into, but it gapes empty between them. “Everything okay?”

 _“Yeah,”_ she replies quickly. Too quickly, if the none-too-steady breath he can hear is anything to go by. _“I hope so.”_ She leaves space for him, but he doesn’t jump either. _“You saw him? The Mayor?”_

“We had a drink here.” He stands again as he says it. He wanders out of his office and hovers over the kitchen sink where the empty glass sits. “He’s … upbeat, all things considered,” he offers, not really sure what she wants out of his answer. Not really sure what she’s asking. “He’ll be okay.”

 _“Good,”_ she says, though she doesn’t sound like she means it. Not wholeheartedly, anyway, so he must have missed the mark. _“I’m sorry how things turned out,”_ she blurts, then steamrolls over her own words as though she’s afraid they sound like kind of what they sound like—a non-apology apology. _“We didn’t even get the guy. Maybe if I’d waited …”_

“If you’d waited, maybe we wouldn’t have even gotten Jordan Norris.” He does jump in this time. It’s as much a guilty lifeline for him as it is for her. He paces from the kitchen back toward the office, then changes course halfway there. He stands, stranded, in the middle of the living room. “We make …” he falters. “Kate, we make the best choices we can with the information we have. It’s all we can do.”

 _“All we can do,”_ she echoes, though he’s not sure she believes him. He’s not sure he believes him, either.


	13. Solo—An Embarrassment of Bitches (4 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lonely isn’t a word she’s used to thinking about, a least not when it comes to herself. She’s always had an only child’s capacity for self-entertainment, for stillness. At least she’s always assumed that’s what’s behind it. And after her mom’s murder, being with people—keeping up appearances, making sure everyone could see she was fine—was just so exhausting that solitude was the haven she sought whenever possible.

> _I could use the company,”  
>  —Richard Castle, An Embarrassment of Bitches (4 x 13)_

* * *

Lonely isn’t a word she’s used to thinking about, a least not when it comes to herself. She’s always had an only child’s capacity for self-entertainment, for stillness. At least she’s always assumed that’s what’s behind it. And after her mom’s murder, being with people—keeping up appearances, making sure everyone could see she was fine—was just so exhausting that solitude was the haven she sought whenever possible.

Royal the dog is kind of a game changer, though. She knows before the door even closes behind Castle that there’s no chance she’ll actually keep him off the couch. Not with those liquid brown eyes and perked-up ears. There’s no chance that she’ll be able to deny him anything he wants. But that the fact that he wants nothing more complicated than to be near her is a game changer.

She gets up to scrounge for something in the fridge, and the dog trots at her heels. “I think you’re out of luck, Bud,” she tells him with a look she wishes were sterner. “I don’t think there’s anything safe for you to eat in here.” She sticks her head deeper in, scanning the very backs of the shelves that are cluttered with jars and cartons and lidded containers whose contents range from useless to possibly biohazardous. “I don’t think there’s anything safe for me to eat in here.”

She climbs back out of the fridge, expecting to find a puddle of slobber at her feet, or at the very least having to fend off Royal’s attempt to make his own call about what is or is not edible in the place, but he’s as close as he can be without being underfoot. He’s in an alert sit with the golden palm frond of his tail swishing soothingly over the floorboards.

“Good boy,” she tells him. She crouches to cup one ear in each of her palms. She brings her nails to bear behind, around the base, over the top, and his tongue lolls happily. “That’s such a good boy.”

She rises to try the cupboards. Royal tips himself back on his haunches and follows her with his eyes. She finds herself talking to him.

“Crackers are good, huh?” She checks the box. The sell-by date passed a while back, but the top is sealed. “And maybe some soup?” She glances over her shoulder and meets a look that says she can do no wrong. She laughs—at herself and the strange sensation of sound—her own voice—in the tiny kitchen. “You know this wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d been on time.”

That draws a thump of the tail. She does a one-eighty with the crackers in one hand and an ancient can of soup in the other, and maybe that’s it. Maybe the fact that she’s turned her full attention on the dog explains the playful twitch forward to bring his rump and the perfect curl of his tail high while his doggy grin dips toward the floor.

“You had fun with him, didn’t you?”

She takes two quick, playful steps toward the nose resting on his neatly aligned paws. She makes a feint as though she’s going to tug at his tail, and he dances happily aside. He lets out a yip of suppressed exuberance, and she can’t resist plumping down on the floor right by him. She swivels on her butt to lean against the fridge. Royal hesitates. He holds until she makes the slightest move to open her arms, and then he’s on her. He’s in her lap and pressing the shocking cold of his nose against the skin of her neck.

“Do you miss him?” she asks. She feels ridiculous, but she buries her face in the dog’s fur and wraps her arms around his wriggling form. “I do, sometimes,” she whispers. “Sometimes I get lonely without him.”


	14. Hard Boiled—The Blue Butterfly (4 x 14)

> _“You two are a walking fairytale.”  
>  —Betsy Sinclair/Lanie Parish, The Blue Butterfly_

* * *

She’s all smiles as they stand shoulder to shoulder in Joe and Vera’s—or Jerry and Viola’s, rather—slightly dingy hallway waiting for the elevator. It looks good on her. Not that there’s much that doesn’t look good on her. He smiles in turn, a champagne-bubble grin that comes all the way up from his toes. She catches him at it.

“What?” she says. She narrows her eyes, but the smile stays.

“What what?” he asks, all innocence. The elevator arrives, and he moseys on in.

“You were staring.” She eyes him from the hall. She dips one toe into the space between the doors as though she’s not entirely convinced she’ll be joining him on the ride down.

“And _you_ were giving me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket,” he shoots back in his best rapid-fire noir, well before he can think through the wisdom of it. He watches her eyes go wide and her ears go red. The temperature in the slightly dingy hallway goes up roughly two hundred degrees,, and the champagne-bubbles pop. “That’s, um, Marlowe. Phillip Marlowe. Um …” He swallows. “I mean, it’s Raymond Chandler, but …”

“ _Farewell, My Lovely,_ ” she says cooly as she steps into the elevator. “Yeah, I know.” She punches the button that’ll carry them down—back to the real world—but she turns on sharp heel toward him, and there’s something about the way she’s holding her body that says she’d like to linger where they’ve been this last little while, with its smoky nightclubs and back alley evening gowns. “I’m not allowed to smile?”

“When’s the last time ‘allowed’ was in the picture with you, doll?” He kicks back against the elevator wall, tugging an invisible fedora down over his brow. 

She laughs—champagne-bubbles-all-the-way-up-from-her-toes laughs. It breaks the mood as the elevator moves jerkily downward, but he might like the one that settles over them now even better. It’s quiet and comfortable. Not Phillip Marlowe and Miss Anne Riordan with her hat tipped to an angle of forty-five degrees, but Nick and Nora Charles headed home for a nightcap by wordless mutual agreement.

She breaks that mood, too, though. Just before the elevator doors open to spill them out into the cracked-tile, battered-mailbox world of Jerry and Viola’s—most definitely not Joe and Vera’s—lobby, her hand twitches out like she means to jam a fist on the big red STOP button. She doesn’t, but she pivots to face him. She blocks his path, filling the whole space the doors leave gaping as they roll open. 

“Thanks, Castle,” she says.

“For what?” he asks.

He studies her as she stares down at the cracked-tile floor, at her own hands, twisting shyly together at her waist. He really doesn’t know what she means. It’s his favorite mystery, his favorite mood yet. 

“For Joe and Vera’s story,” she says. Her ears go red again. “For finding the ending.”

“It’s a good one, isn’t it?” He falls into step beside her as she turns to make her way through the lobby. “Good enough you’d think a dame’d be grateful enough to buy a guy a drink.”

“You _would_ think that, wouldn’t you?” She doesn’t look at him. She shrugs into her coat against the chill and turns her face away so he has only the barest glimpse of her profile.

“Two days ago, I woulda held out for it,” he says as he hitches his shoulders and drops back into the persona. It’s something in the spaces between Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Joe Flynn. It’s something that makes her smile into the glittering winter night. “But there’s was no point in dialing that number, not with this dame, so I caved. I crumbled. I went down like Jimmy Doyle in Cleveland. I opened my mouth and some pencil-necked kid’s squeak came out.”

He turns to her just as they step into a copper pool of street light. He rides the moment, impulsively tugging her by the elbow to swing her around so they’re face to face. She’s all smiles as she peers up at him through a dramatic flutter of lashes. It looks good on her. His tongue-in-cheek narration turns prophecy. HIs voice comes out a full octave higher than he’d like it to.

  
"Hey, sister, any chance a tomato like you’d be caught dead tipping a few with a palooka like me?“


	15. Inversion—Pandora (4 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything is upside down. The whole world since that first alarming descent fifteen floors below wherever. The first descent of many, as it turns out, and everything is upside down.

> _“This is my thing. This is our thing.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Pandora (4 x 15) _

* * *

Everything is upside down. The whole world since that first alarming descent fifteen floors below wherever. The first descent of many, as it turns out, and everything is upside down.

She is suddenly the tag-along. She’s the obviously unwelcome third wheel at the smiling, murmured reunion of Castle and Muse 1.0. She’s the piece that Sophia Turner deigns to move around a board the NYPD is too insignificant—too much of a potential nuisance—to know the rules of.

She is the jealous girlfriend, except she’s not the girlfriend. She has no right be jealous of anything in the here and now, let alone anything in comparatively ancient history, and she hates this. She fucking hates feeling like she’s sixteen years old and her boyfriend just got a surprise visit from the girl he lost his virginity to at summer camp.

She hates that he’s—mostly—being the adult, because everything is upside down. 

He’s the one who staves off the conversation about who this woman even is. That’s self-preservation, sure, but it’s also probably necessary. It’s something he undoubtedly had to agree to back in the day, and in any case, Secret Agent Summer Camp Girlfriend’s underground lair is not really the place for a conversation like that.

She grits her teeth and swallows that little factoid down, but it’s too late: Sophia saunters in and hands him coffee—fucking _coffee._ She offers up the edited for television version of their story in broad strokes. She manages to convey the idea that she’s definitely leaving out the good parts, and Kate realizes that this is _definitely_ not the place she wants to have this conversation.

He’s the one who calls her on the passive–aggressive potshots she’s taking when the two of them finally surface. He’s calm, if exasperated, when she denies being upset, and he eases them around to something as out in the world as it gets, which is not very, when it comes to them—to talking about _them_ out loud.

He fixes his gaze on her and tells her it never was the way with Sophia that it is with them. He holds for applause, for laughter, for the merest fucking acknowledgement from her that there is a way it is with them, and she shrinks back into petty details. How long is “brief,” exactly? How many others have their been?

He’s the one who hits the panic button, which is absolutely the right thing to do. Gage has them dead to rights with her own weapon pointed at them, because apparently her jealous teenage brain has no room for the basics of police work, and yeah, that’s definitely cause for panic.

It was definitely the right thing to do, but all she can do is snipe about it in the confines Tracy McGrath’s trunk. Because if she’s not sniping she doesn’t know what inconvenient truths might make their way out of her mouth—the fact that she hates this, that she’s jealous and he smells good and there’s no tiger this time, so maybe they can just wait this whole stupid fucking case out in the trunk of a GTO in New Jersey.

The things she might blurt are endless and stupid and _embarrassing,_ so she snipes instead. She pushes him away literally and figuratively, with elbows and knees, as she casts about for some means of brute forcing their way out of the damned trunk. _I am not gonna be rescued by your girlfriend,_ she snaps. It’s the stupidest, most childish fucking thing, and she hates this.

Everything is upside down


	16. Buoy—Linchpin (4 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s hell bent on holding him up in the wake of everything. In the wake of Sophia and at least two different flavors of near death. In the wake of what may or may not have been a close encounter with the end of the world, she has affixed herself to his side. She bumps her shoulder with his, and every time he trails off—every time his thoughts start to drag him downward as swiftly and smoothly as The Company’s sinister inversion of the Great Glass Elevator—she tugs him back upward and into real time.

> _“Do you really buy this?”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Linchpin (4 x 16)_

* * *

She’s hell bent on holding him up in the wake of everything. In the wake of Sophia and at least two different flavors of near death. In the wake of what may or may not have been a close encounter with the end of the world, she has affixed herself to his side. She bumps her shoulder with his, and every time he trails off—every time his thoughts start to drag him downward as swiftly and smoothly as The Company’s sinister inversion of the Great Glass Elevator—she tugs him back upward and into real time.

“Could you eat?” she asks, her hands on the steering wheel.

“Eat,” he repeats. He belatedly registers that the steering wheel is surprise. The fact that they’re in her supposedly better-than-new car, but not apparently going anywhere, is a surprise. “I don’t remember eating.”

“Kinda why I was asking, Castle.” She rolls her eyes. She’s trying to hold him up—to make things feel normal—but it’s forced. “I thought we could—“

“I think I’d just like to go home,” he cuts in.

It’s a lie. He absolutely would not like to go home at the moment. He absolutely would not like to run face first into his daughter’s questions and his mother’s significant looks. He absolutely would not like to have to reckon with image of Sophia perched at the foot of his bed, her fingerprints on the board in his office, her lingering perfume and the echo of her words. 

_Is she? Or do you just think she is?_

He absolutely would welcome any alternative to that, but she shouldn’t have to hold him up in the wake of a disaster so wholly of his own making.

“Okay,” she says. The syllables come out separately, like she’s run face first into something she absolutely would like not to have run into, and he guesses that must be him. She switches on the ignition with extreme prejudice, then switches it off again. “No. Not okay.”

“Kate.” He closes his eyes. His head falls back against the headrest and he swears he can feel his brain knocking against the inside of skull like a wayward canon ball. “I really would like to—“

“No. I don’t think you ‘would like to’.” He hears her jerk the key free of the steering column. He hears them clatter into the tray on the center console as she hurls them down. “I don’t think you _should_ go home.”

“You’re right,” he says. He lets his head tip toward her. He opens his eyes with a Herculean effort. “I should never go home. I should walk the earth like _Kung Fu._ ”

She gives him a courtesy chuckle, far more than the lame joke deserves. She’s holding him up.

“Look, Castle.” She looks out through the windshield at nothing. “I just think it’s a good idea to to … let go of some of this before you hole up alone.” She has the good grace to go red in the cheeks even before his incredulous gaze swings toward her. “You’re not the only one she fooled.”

“No, I guess I’m not,” he laughs. It comes out rusty and grating. “Doubt Danberg will be inviting me to the post-Sophia support group, though.” He looks away. He fixes his gaze on he parking garage wall. He’s grateful for the dingy grey expanse of it. Grateful, at least, that it’s not that strange, gleaming white.

“That’s not what I …” She grinds to a halt. She grips the steering wheel hard. “Protecting her op. Yeah. She fooled everyone for years. Like Danberg said, that’s just the—”

“The oldest intelligence con in the book,” he finishes. “Which you called from the start.”

“Yeah. I called it.” She gives a metallic laugh of her own. She draws into herself—shoulders folding toward one another, chin dropping to her chest, the shutters dropping hard behind her eyes. He watches it happen. And the next second, he watches it … _un_ happen. She uncurls her fingers from the steering wheel, one by one. She presses her shoulders back against the seat and lifts her chin. She turns toward him, her gaze naked. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t get to me.”

 _How?_ he wants to ask. He almost does ask, even though he knows. Not the exact particulars, but the details that crowd suddenly into his mind are bad enough. The drawn-out beginning, the swift, ugly ending. The whole affair. He knows what Sophia would have said as surely as he knows there’s nothing he can say. He crumples in on himself. He deflates, collapses, _descends,_ but she holds him up.

“She got to me for a minute,” she says briskly. She switches the ignition on. “But like I said: She told a lot of lies.”


	17. Propinquity—Once Upon a Crime (4 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martha’s play is wonderful, whatever he thinks. Whatever he hisses in editorial whispers delivered direct to her ear while the performance is still in progress. The harrowing, obviously … enhanced … drama throws the genuine struggles with money, rejection, loss, disappointment into sharp relief.

> _“It needs something much more intimate.”  
>  —Martha Rodgers, Once Upon a Crime (4 x 17)_

* * *

Martha’s play is wonderful, whatever he thinks. Whatever he hisses in editorial whispers delivered direct to her ear while the performance is still in progress. The harrowing, obviously … enhanced … drama throws the genuine struggles with money, rejection, loss, disappointment into sharp relief.

The humor is broad and outrageous, but tinged with enough truth to make her ache beyond ribs that are sore from laughing. It has sharply drawn, rapid-fire characters that she misses the moment they exit each scene, and a vivd sense of place that holds New York and a dozen tiny summer stock towns in the palm of its hand. It’s wonderful, however pointed his slow claps are in the end.

Martha wilts more or less the moment she finishes her bows. She insubstantially birdlike and heavy with exhaustion at once as sh embraces Kate with an almost absent _Thank you, darling._ He rolls his eyes and takes his mother’s elbow. The two of them snipe all the way to the foot of the stairs, but he says something in a low voice as he presses a kiss to her cheek. The beauty that was meets the beauty that is as Martha’s weary face suffuses with light.

Marcus—she thinks the baby-faced playwright-slash-ghost-writer’s name is Marcus—has the good sense to take Castle’s looming, not-so-subtle hint and beat a hasty retreat soon after. Alexis says she’ll stay, that she’s honor bound as stage manager to put things to rights, but she’s wilting, too, so he shoos her upstairs.

“If she’s sticking to the usual schedule, we’re about three minutes from the Actor’s Catharsis,” she hears him say. “You may want to throw down a tarp for when the make-up starts running.”

He dodges a jab to the ribs for that and kisses the crown of his daughter’s head. Alexis calls out a soft goodnight from halfway up the stairs and Kate returns the wave. She feels another piece of their still-fractured relationship settle back into place and sees in the girl’s tucked-underneath smile that she feels it, too.

They’re alone, then, and they’re not. She’s paused with her fingers curled around the loop at the top of a dining room chair. His hands, first one, then the other, come to rest on either side of hers on thestudded leather of the back. She looks down at the neat row they make—him, her, him—and a giddy laugh tickles the back of her throat. She thinks about his warning— _It’s a family trait: We tend to go big_ —and how much more dangerous this is.

They’re surrounded by memories, by Martha’s tall tales of him as a sweet, wicked, infuriating little boy, and by his counterstrikes in grumbles and whispers and murmurs still reverberating in and around the furniture in disarray.

They’re surrounded by memories _they’ve_ made here: The first awkward dance in his office when she needed more of Melanie Cavanaugh’s story, cocoa by the gas fire and scrambled eggs they never got to eat when he took her in, the brush of his shaking fingers against hers, hers against his, when they needed to be sure of each other after the bank robbery.

They’re surrounded by potential, by the crackling yet-to-be of how they know and don’t know each other. How they _will_ know each other, because what’s to come is a mystery, and it’s as inevitable as every fairytale happily ever after.

“Hey, no more heavy lifting,” he says softly. He tries to nudge her hand free of its hold on the chair. It’s the kind of thinly veiled excuse for contact they’ve fallen into lately, and she shivers. He shivers as _yet-to-be_ draws close around the two of them. “You’ve done more than enough of that tonight.”

“I don’t mind.” She curls her fingers tighter. “I don’t mind staying.


	18. Roughshod—A Dance With Death (4 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s indignant—positively indignant—at the possibility that his mother is going to apologize to Oona Marconi. She comes to a dramatic stop, hands on hips, two landings down from the fourth floor. They’re walking out together, steering clear of the gaggle of thugs another squad is ferrying up in the elevator.

> _“I think I can rise above.”  
>  —Martha Rodgers, A Dance With Death (4 x 18)_

* * *

She’s indignant—positively _indignant_ —at the possibility that his mother is going to apologize to Oona Marconi. She comes to a dramatic stop, hands on hips, two landings down from the fourth floor. They’re walking out together, steering clear of the gaggle of thugs another squad is ferrying up in the elevator.

“Why would _Martha_ apologize?” she demands to know. “Why would she apologize to that bully?”

“Because that bully,” he says, not doing a great job of hiding a smile at her fiery response, “happens to hold the power in this situation. Real power. Not just lunch money power or wedgie power. Although she’d probably give my mother a wedgie in a heartbeat.”

“Well that …” She’s not amused by his attempt at levity. She casts about for the right word. “That _sucks._ ”

“It does,” he agrees. He watches her sidelong, not quite sure where this is coming from. “Bullies should never win.”

“Did you ever have one?” she asks. It’s a sudden contraction from blazing, righteous fury into something small, like an ember about to wink out. “A bully,” she adds swiftly, as though he might not follow the hard left turn in her line of questioning.

It takes him a second, truthfully. It’s a reversal of their usual dynamic—her asking, him answering.

“A scholarship kid who liked to write? What could a boarding school full of rich jocks have possibly have found to bully _me_ about?” He laughs a little as he says it, a reflexive side step with a bit of self-deprecation for good measure. That’s all it’s meant to be, but her spine stiffens and her gaze shutters and he really wishes he hadn’t laughed. He sits down hard on the step above the landing and ducks his head. “Yeah, I had a bully or two.”

“I wondered,” she says, nodding. He laughs again. He can’t help it, and he figures it’s fair enough this time, and she seems to think so, too. She seems to realize how it sounds, and she sits down beside him and bumps his shoulder with her own, a half apology. “I just mean, you …”

“Cry out for abuse?” He risks teasing her a little. He bumps her shoulder back. “Have an invisible sign on my forehead that says ‘Pick on me!’? That would explain a lot, actually.”

“You’re nice,” she blurts. “You’re kind. That’s not usually an asset when you’re a teenager.”

“No, I guess it’s not,” he says slowly. He’s taken utterly aback. He rewinds the last ten minutes in his mind and tries to follow the breadcrumb trail from a crowded elevator to here, but there isn’t one, at least not one he can find. “But I don’t know if I’d say I was a particularly nice teenager.” She shoots him a glare and he wishes again that his reflex to deflect weren’t still so sharp. But it is, and he blunders on. “Well _you_ must’ve …” He trails off. Twice. “Did you have … ?”

She shakes her head. His heart clangs in his chest, awkward and painful. He realizes, far from the first time, that most of what he knows about her—most of what he can even picture—is crowded into the time between her mother’s murder and now. He thinks about sunlight and the swings and he has a better idea how they got here now. He sees, sitting in a dank stairwell, all the little ways she’s been reaching out from beyond that wall. 

“Well, I know you weren’t one,” he says finally. He shakes his head emphatically. It’s true. It tastes and sounds and feels true. “A bully? Not you.”

“No.” She frowns. She turns her gaze ruthlessly inward. “I don’t think I was.” Her voice drops low. “But I didn’t help sometimes, you know? I didn’t take the risk when I should have.”

“I definitely know,” he assures her, and it’s true. He has a hundred queasy memories of scuttling by, feeling like he’d lucked out, as some other unfortunate soul suffered a pile-on by a familiar faces.

They sit in silence a while, shoulder to shoulder. She’s the one to pull them out, though. She straightens her spine and lifts her chin.

“We help now, though,” she declares. “We don’t let the bullies win.”

“We don’t.” He smiles as echoes the words. It sounds—it _feels_ —like a solid thump that shakes the foundations of a stubborn old wall in her, in him, between them. “That’s, like, our whole job.”


	19. Succor—47 Seconds (4 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a little embarrassing how much of a comfort he is during the bombing case. Not embarrassing. She knows, intellectually—cognitively, as Burke would say—that it’s not embarrassing to lean on people. It shouldn’t be embarrassing to take comfort in the support, caring, the love others in her life have to give, but she’s a work in progress, and it’s a little embarrassing how much of a comfort he is.

> _“You know I always try to help Johnny Law.”  
>  —Westside Wally, 47 Seconds (4 x 19)_

* * *

It’s a little embarrassing how much of a comfort he is during the bombing case. Not embarrassing. She knows, intellectually— _cognitively,_ as Burke would say—that it’s not embarrassing to lean on people. It _shouldn’t_ be embarrassing to take comfort in the support, caring, the _love_ others in her life have to give, but she’s a work in progress, and it’s a little embarrassing how much of a comfort he is.

The case has gotten to her. It’s gotten to all of them. It’s tapped a nerve more deeply than usual. Even though every one of them deals with death day in, day out, this one has definitely gotten to them: The carnage itself, the utterly chaotic nature of the crime, the complete lack of control they have over the means to solve it, because on top of everything, they all feel like the FBI has given them busywork to do. And when it looks like they might actually get somewhere with their perpetual interviews, there’s the FBI hamstringing them or rushing in to scoop up the lead. It’s all salt in a particularly awful wound, but he’s such a comfort.

He’s a comfort in the way he takes the weight of it. She sees her own shock, dismay, anger, helplessness reflected in his eyes. She hears it, rearranged into something bleak and beautiful in his words. She feels it in how gentle and serious he is with her when, for too brief a moment, it’s just the two of them, and it’s such a comfort to have him shoulder the burden with her. 

It’s a comfort how … silly he manages to be, even in the midst of this. Not silly—playful. He finds quiet ways to play the fool a little, and that’s more than just entertainment. In Gates’s office, he lets fly quips about the dangers of MSG and a sea of Waldos, and she thinks at first he’s on some kind of suicide mission until he inclines his head slightly toward her and she gets it. She glides in with her big ask about the surveillance footage, and Gates, with a Herculean sigh and a final glare in his direction, says she’ll try.

It’s a glimmer of hope, at best. A glimmer, at least, and the swell of relief she feels—the swell of gratitude toward him—is a little embarrassing. She chews her lip, wondering what to say, how much to say, how to say it at all.

“Probably shouldn’t be poking the bear right now, Castle,” she tells him finally. She’s scowling and smiling and blushing all at the same time.

 _“Au contraire,_ Detective,” he says, and she can see he knows that it’s the scowl that’s only for show. “This is the perfect time to poke the bear.” She cocks her head, waiting, and he drops the court jester façade for a moment. He glances through the glass where Gates is stalking the perimeter of her desk with her phone to her ear. “This is … awful for her, too. Worse in some ways, I guess.” He shakes his head. “Even she must have some stuff to bleed off.”

“So you thought you’d get her to yell at you?” She finds herself laughing. Just a little, but actually laughing, despite everything.

“Some people find yelling at me relaxing.” He grins at her, pleased with himself and happy that she’s pleased with him. Happy that there’s something he can do for her, for Gates, for whomever, exactly when it feels like there’s nothing any of them can do.

It’s only a temporary oasis, that moment. It’s half a dozen breaths they’re able to catch quietly as everything awful swirls around them in the bullpen. Just half a dozen breaths, before the next thing. Ryan and Esposito descend, bickering with each other yammering at them about Beethoven, and he’s off, wondering if it’s time-traveling regular Beethoven, or some kind of immortal, mirror-verse Evil Beethoven. 

“We should get a sketch from Westside,” he says, his tone dead serious. “See if he has a goatee or not.” Esposito glares and shakes his head. Ryan squinches up his face and wonders aloud if Evil Beethoven could be a time traveler, too, or if he’d definitely have to be immortal. They share tight smiles all around. They take another half-dozen breaths, just the four of them. They get back to work, refreshed, re-centered, renewed, even if it’s just a little. 

It’s such a comfort to have him. 

_A/N: This is obviously a very rough patch, friends. I’m hoping to make it to the end of season 4. I’ll do my best._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is obviously a very rough patch, friends. It was hard to make it to the end of Season 4


	20. Kinetic—The Limey (4 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The key is to keep moving, to hurl himself forward from one moment into the next, ever forward. Moving means not thinking. It means not engaging with anything more complicated than whatever cast of characters happens to be around, wherever he happens to find himself.

> _“Your first instinct was to flee?”  
>  —Kate Beckett, The Limey (4 x 20)_

* * *

The key is to keep moving, to hurl himself forward from one moment into the next, ever forward. Moving means not thinking. It means not engaging with anything more complicated than whatever cast of characters happens to be around, wherever he happens to find himself.

Not find himself. Lose himself. That’s what Vegas is about. He doesn’t stay where he usually stays. He doesn’t go where he usually goes, even though “usually” is a long ways behind him. He hasn’t been here for years, not outside a dozen hours or less on a couple of book tours. He hasn’t really been here since …

The realization sours things. What lies beyond the ellipsis makes Vegas impossible, so he keeps moving. He calls from the airport to suggest in the strongest terms possible that his mother improvise some reason for her and Alexis to get out of the loft—out of the city—for a few days.

_“A few days? And then what?” she demands. “Richard, this is madness. You can’t keep on … ”_

“Mother.” He hates how strangled his voice sounds. How pained, but that’s exactly it. Pain. That’s exactly what blossoms in the crevices of his shattered self if he doesn’t keep moving. “Mother, please, can’t you just …”

She relents. It’s a barometer for how bad he must sound, but he’s too relieved to care. She makes noises about Easter week and opening the Hamptons house early for the season. He thanks her after a fashion and hangs up. He keeps moving.

It’s harder on the plane. It’s an odd flight. The middle of the night, he guesses, or maybe not quite? First class is barely half full of sleeping bodies. It’s full of dim light and the oppressive quiet that comes with he roar of engines and he can’t have that. He can’t have any of that, so he strikes up a conversation with the flight attendant. Jacinda, and she’s more than receptive.

She plies him with tiny bottles of alcohol and chatters. He chatters back. It’s utterly banal, meaningless, familiar, though at a distance. Like Vegas. It’s motion of a kind and kills off the hours of the flight one by one.

The wheels touch down and the plane bounces. It feels like an omen. It is an omen. He switches his phone on as they hit the gate and the seatbelt sign extinguishes with a cheerful _bong._ The phone lights up with her text from just a few minutes ago.

He comes to a full and complete stop. He averts his gaze from the screen like it’s blinding sun. Out the window, the familiar lights of the city are no better. Pain suffuses him and something else with it. Doubt, confusion, fear, because he can’t keep on …

What’s beyond the ellipsis. He has no idea, and he’s terrified, because without realizing it—without deciding to—he’s been moving toward something these last few years. Meaningful work. Meaningful friendships. Family he’s chosen and who have chosen him.

And her.

He’s been moving toward _her,_ and everything else seems so contingent on that. This version of himself he’s become, who wants things of substance, who wants to do things with his life that matter. This version of himself who is completely incompatible with Vegas and Jacinda and every single fucking thing that came before that book party.

The phone drags his gaze back to it. It drags his pain and fear and doubt and anger back to the waiting bubble beneath the address. He’s pinned to the spot like some specimen the world is hell bent on slicing in to to see what it’s made of.

Jacinda appears. Her shadow falls over him, over the screen. It blots out the address and the waiting bubble beneath. Her red lips curve into a moue of concern, “Everything all right?”

“Everything,” he echoes dully. That seems to be the problem. _Everything._ He pushes it from him, all of it. He launches himself forward into the next moment. Moving. “Everything,” he says again. “Everything is great.” He calls up a hard smile, familiar at a distance. “Or it will be when I ask you to go for a ride and you say yes.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ouch. 


	21. Inciting—Headhunters (4 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fifty minutes felt eternal not so long ago. When she first landed in Burke’s Chamber of Arm Chair Horrors by post-shooting mandate. When circumstances drove her back there, and she played at progress—at coping. When she stared into the pain-mad eyes of Lee Travis and decided to stop playing—to take her life back and be more—it felt eternal.

> _“I wouldn’t knock myself out looking for motive.”  
>  —Ethan Slaughter, Headhunters (4 x 21)_

* * *

Fifty minutes felt eternal not so long ago. When she first landed in Burke’s Chamber of Arm Chair Horrors by post-shooting mandate. When circumstances drove her back there, and she played at progress—at coping. When she stared into the pain-mad eyes of Lee Travis and decided to stop playing—to take her life back and be more—it felt eternal.

Now, she doesn’t know where the time goes. She paces and perches, tense, on the arm of the chair, and worries that’s a return to form. The movement, the strategy of keeping herself at right angles to Burke’s unwaveringly calm demeanor and trenchant questions. It feels the ride has looped right back to the beginning, and the time goes so quickly.

Burke spends so much of it reassuring her that she has made, is making, will make progress. He spends so much of it redrawing the frame of the situation so that Castle is out of the picture. His actions and motives are outside the scope of the investigation, and the focus is on her—how she’ll react, what she’ll do, what she wants to do.

She spends so much of the magically shrinking fifty minutes trying to explain that it doesn’t work that way. It can’t work that way because Castle is … inextricable from this. From her life. From her mind and heart, yes, but that isn’t the point. It’s not the only point. He is central in every possible way to what she is going through right now.

Because there is a simple explanation. Occam’s Razor, laying her insides bare, says she is simply a fool. It says that he is who he always was: A shallow, twice-married womanizer. An entitled, selfish, self-aggrandizing jackass, and this—whatever falls under the heading of this—is that uncomplicated truth manifesting.

It’s seductive, this elementary school read on things, because she has abominable judgement when it comes to men. For all her armor, her trust issues, her rigid, capacious definition of independence, she reliably opens up to the wrong man, makes the wrong move at the worst possible time, takes up stupid, stubborn positions on who should owe what to whom.

It’s an explanation that would save everyone a lot of time, but it doesn’t fit the evidence. There’s a faint but fierce voice inside her that it doesn’t fit with four years filled with what she knows of him: That he’s kind; that cruelty—punching down of any kind—is among the few things that can trigger a temper that’s otherwise difficult to rouse; that he is generous, thoughtful, though frequently oblivious; that he is so comfortable in his sense of self, he’s almost impossible to embarrass, yet he’s quick to doubt himself in the strangest ways.

Occam’s Razor is undone completely by all that. Even variation number 472 of it that she tries to sell doesn’t wash.

_In the mean time, he’s moved on._

It’s not an interrogation, at least not one where she’s in her accustomed seat, but her fatalism—her self-flagellation just as the clock is about to run out—frustrates Burke enough that he breaks his own rule. He pulls focus and there’s Castle, smack dab in the middle of the frame.

_Or he’s protecting himself by not taking more emotional risks._

It rings true. As she exits the office, dazed and muted like always, it sounds like a lead, albeit a painful one that she doesn’t know what to do with, so she works the Burke’s Chamber of Arm Chair Horrors program, as it were.

She considers her choices: What to say when Castle’s running around with Slaughter hurts Ryan’s feelings and pisses Esposito off, what to do when he’s gotten himself into something truly alarming. She controls what she can. She does what she can live with. She takes risks for what’s worth it. For him. She risks her job and her heart and every bit of progress she’s made toward who she wants to be, and for her trouble she gets a question. A lead that smashes Occam’s Razor to bits, and it’s his mouth that it drop right out of.

_Why hide when you can run?_


	22. Omission/Commission—Undead Again (4 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels, unpleasantly, like he’s just waking up. And it’s not just on one front. It’s as if suddenly, every safeguard he’s so carefully built into his life to keep him on an even keel hasn’t so much failed as it has come to its natural, logical, ruthless end.

> _“The monster we are hunting might be in this very room.”  
>  —Kate Beckett, Undead Again (4 x 22) _

* * *

****He feels, unpleasantly, like he’s just waking up. And it’s not just on one front. It’s as if suddenly, every safeguard he’s so carefully built into his life to keep him on an even keel hasn’t so much failed as it has come to its natural, logical, ruthless end.

His daughter has a decision to make that he’s done everything within his paternal power to make as easy as possible for her. And along the way, she’s come to realize that it’s time to put away childish things, and that leaves him flat footed, unprepared, at a loss, because how can she—the child of him and _Meredith_ —ever come to think that’s some kind of necessary outcome. But the one explains the other, and all of that is as predictable as it can be. It’s the natural course of events.

But then his mother opens her mouth, and a shocking accusation pours forth. A shocking truth: _If you want to punish Beckett, at least let her know why._

He feels worse than deluded when she says it. So much worse than deluded when he has to acknowledge that it’s exactly what he’s been doing. Punishing her. For what?

For her lack of honesty. Certainly. That’s more than fair enough. She knows he loves her. She’s known for months, and she’s kept her mouth shut for whatever her reasons are. He’s ranged far and wide on what those might be, from embarrassment for his sake to something far more sinister. Far more cruel.

But even for that—even for a sin of omission—does he have any right to punish her? He senses somewhere beyond the gnarled black borders of his heartbreak that there might by any number of good, sane, compassionate reasons she might really believe what she told him from the start: _They say that there’s some things that are better not being remembered._ There might be any number of explanations that are better—more consistent with who he knows her to be—than the suspicions he’s been dragging through the world like an anchor.   
It only gets worse from there, because it’s not honesty, or lack thereof, that’s been driving him. He’d like to say it is. He’d like to shout from the nearest mountaintop that if she’d only just told him, he’d have torn out his wounded heart and buried it forever, but it’s not true. It’s not true.

What’s true—what he has to admit now—is he’s been punishing her for not loving him back.

It’s appalling. It’s almost, but not quite, as devastating as the fact that she doesn’t love him, because … . _Because._

Because beyond being head over heels in love with her, he cares for her in a way he’s not sure he’s ever cared about anyone he’s ever been in a relationship with—not Kyra, because he was young and stupid and selfish. Not Gina either time, because that was the point of Gina. Not even the mother of his only child, because if Meredith hadn’t been that, she’d really have been nothing to him after things ended. But he cares for Kate. He respects her and _values_ her, and wants her to value _him._ And whatever madness has taken hold of him these last few weeks, he never wants her to hurt, let alone to be the cause of it.

All of that is true. All of that cuts him to the bone, and still, when he makes up his mind to end it—to walk back into her life one last time—he is awful. He is petty and cruel and childish and _less than,_ and he cannot stop himself from lashing out. He cannot help but withhold and torment and _punish_ at every turn, even though he despises himself all the more for it, because now he knows what he’s been doing, and still he can’t stop himself.

And then there is Kyle Jennings. Then there is the bizarre play-within-a-play that is the man’s story. He’s cynical about it. He hardens himself to what he’d have seen as genuine anguish any other time. He uses it to make his sullen accusation at last. To call her out and put an end to it.

_When a life-altering moment occurs, people remember._

It’s hardly even between the lines and he expects … He has no actual idea what he expects. For her to laugh and walk away. To cut him dead and kick his mortal remains as she goes. It’s all so much stupid childishness spilling out of him, and none of it has anything to do with anything in the real world.

In the real world, she squares her shoulders. She faces him and tells him, hardly even between the lines, that she has been afraid. That she is _still_ afraid and she doesn’t want to be. She faces him and tells him that she’s trying. She’s _been_ trying, and he’s been punishing her. He’s made her feel like she isn’t safe with him.

It’s a miserable awakening to guilt that complicates his heartbreak. To anger he’s entitled to and anger that wouldn’t have festered and wounded them—each of them alone, both of them together—if either one of them could’ve opened their damned mouth. It’s an ending to this terrible interlude. It’s a beginning if they can be brave enough to make it one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, these get really long; I had tried for a long time to keep to 500 words.


	23. Triumvirate—Always (4 x 23)

> _“If you must know, I was naked underneath.”  
>  —Richard Castle, Always (4 x 23)_

* * *

Their first time is all but wordless. It’s desperate in the beginning. It’s hungry and insistent, as though they can claw back all the time they’ve lost with sharp-nipping teeth and quick hands that roam and map and claim.

But it turns solemn before long. He discovers her scars. He seeks them out, and she guides him right to them. Both things are true in a single moment. He bows his head, and the pause before his hands part the fabric to expose the round, stippled expanse between her breasts is eternal against the backdrop of their frenzy up till then.

But she lifts their joined hands to it with measured, unhurried reverence. She lifts them without fear or shame or the all-consuming anger that has risen in her every time she’s seen or touched or remembered it in the last year. She lifts their joined hands to it, and there is nothing but the desire to be known entirely. She kisses him, pressing her heartbeat into his palm. She gasps as his mouth descends to tongue and nip and kiss the killing thing itself and the undisturbed skin that surrounds it with the slow deliberation of a prayer.

She leads him to the bedroom. She arches her spine as he peels the sopping wet shirt from the chilled surface of her skin. She raises one arm overhead and turns her body toward him. Lightning flashes, a stutter of blue–white that startles the warm gold of the bedside lamps into retreat. It throws the still-angry furrow along her ribs into sharp relief.

She anchors herself with fingers buried in his hair. This one is paradoxically harder for her, the precision flash of a scalpel blade that saved her from drowning in her own blood. It’s an emblem of her own frailty until his touch transforms it. He is inquisitive, fascinated. His lips and fingertips travel its length it as though he’s coaxing into being something he’s only known in the abstract till now.

Lightning flashes again, and she sees it as he must. _I watched you die in that ambulance._ She wraps her arms around his shoulders, pressing herself closer to the rasp of his cheek, the slow glide of his palms, and the warmth of his mouth. In the stuttering blue–white, she sees the scar as salvation, as the means of surviving everything before this moment. 

He discovers the rest of her body with staggering attention to detail that has her desperate long before he finally braces himself over her and slides home. They both cry out, hers a sharp sound of wanting, his a low, determined groan that gives the roll of thunder a run for its money. It rumbles its way along every nerve from deep in her spine, her belly, the muscles of her legs and arms, all the way out to the farthest reaches of her fingertips, her scalp, the creases of her elbows and knees.

It’s all but wordless. 

* * *

Their second time is confessional. It starts that way. 

They’ve each fallen into exhausted, immediate sleep. Their limbs are hopelessly tangled together, their bodies at an oblique angle to the geometry of the bed. The sheets, the blankets, the pillows are casualties strewn around them, on the bed and off. They are an arresting still life as the storm continues to rage outside.

For him, that sleep is all languid indigo dreams. He is tossed on a sea of soothing waves as the rise and fall of her breath form a counterpoint with his own. Even in sleep, his mind assiduously catalogs each new sensation. The scent of her skin in the vulnerable hollow of her throat, the salt tang of her sweat, the variegated beauty of her eyes in the low bedroom light, in the sudden shock of lightning through ran-spattered glass, and the fizzing, sparkling joy of one thousand points of contact between her body and his, then, now, still.

For her, it is the velvet black of absolute rest. Her body takes what it needs after her physical ordeal on the rooftop, and though her mind and heart are alive with shimmering aftershocks, the sensation is calming, like the filigree touch of her mother’s fingers on nights when she’d come home long after Kate had gone to bed. It draws the breath sharp from her lungs then keeps unwavering watch as she sinks back into that much-needed sleep. 

But a sudden memory jolts her from the peace she’s only just found. The metallic thud of her gun on to Gates’ desk. The sharp contours of her badge in her hand and the topography of its surface. She starts awake with the memory of it falling from her hand.

“Castle!” She braces her palms against his chest and half rises. “Castle, I need to tell you—” 

He is awake instantly. He reaches for her. His thumbs stroke the skin just behind her ears. They find the apex of tension in the muscles of her neck and smooth it away as though he has known her body forever.

“Kate,” he stops his own mouth as he presses it to hers. He watches with a mixture of curiosity and concern as she struggles to draw the sheet up over her body. He helps her with it, wrapping the soft material across her breasts and securing it with the breadth of his palm against her shoulder blade. “Kate, what is it?”

“I quit.” She blinks hard, more in shock than anything. “I’m not a cop anymore. I resigned.”

He doesn’t laugh. She sees the moment when he might and feels the familiar desire to strangle him. It passes. He whisks the sheet from her body with a flourish.

“Not a cop,” he says. He rolls her on top of him and folds her in his arms. He twines his calves around hers and arches himself hard against her. “I wonder what you’ll be next,” he breathes. “I wonder, Kate.”

* * *

Their third time is ridiculous.

She stirs in her sleep to find her left hand nerve dead and bloodless. Her arm is flung high above her head. There’s a pillow doubled beneath her shoulder, and she has a faint, silver-edged memory of him arranging it there when the aftermath of Cole Maddox started to settle in. She tries to shift her body, to draw the limb under the layers of sheet, blanket, duvet he must have tucked carefully around her as she drifted into sleep again, but she can’t move.

It’s annoying, rather than alarming. It’s inconvenient, because she wants him again. She wants to draw warmth from his body. She wants the tickling texture of his chest, his legs, his arms in delicious contrast to the surface of her own skin.

She tips her head to demand his urgent presence. He’s dead asleep somewhere well south of her. He’s flopped on his belly on top of the duvet. She struggles to tilt her chin down and sees his nose a fraction of an inch from her ribs where the cocoon of blankets has come undone. She connects the possessive weight against her hip to the fan of his fingers spread wide. She glimpses the curve of his backside, a million miles away, and she _wants_ him, but she can’t move.

“Castle,” she groans in a voice that sounds like someone else’s, it’s so filled with liquid satisfaction, despite the ache and throb and searing pain of injured everything. She thinks for a flaring moment it really must belong to someone else. “Castle come _here.”_

That’s cross and impatient. More like her, and it’s what wakes him with a start.

“I’m up.” The bed rises beside her as his head snaps up. The welcome weight lifts from her hip as he moves to scrub a hand across his face. She lets out a strangled cry at the loss, at the frustration of him moving further away when she wants him. “Kate, I’m up. What?” He looms over her, braced on an elbow. His hand flutters above her skin, not daring to alight and she wonders what she must look like, bruised and scraped and swollen, here, there, and everywhere. “Kate?”

“I can’t feel my hand,” she snaps. Her gaze flicks upward. His follows. “I can’t move.”

“You can’t move,” he repeats. She hears the ripple of concern mingling with desire, with wicked intention. “You probably shouldn’t have told me that, Beckett.”

He slithers up the bed, up the length of her body even as he draws the covers downward to lay her bare. He rises up on his knees, a looming presence that flips her insides. He lowers his head, infinitely slowly. His lips bypass her mouth, her breasts, the quick-breath flutter of her belly. They land on the crest of her hip and vibrate the skin there in a violent, wet-sounding shock.

“You can’t move?” He quirks an eyebrow at her. “Let’s find out what tickles.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you again to those who have followed me this far. Again, sorry for the length.


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